A Miscellany of Subject Mstter

*The FBI's Take on A-A Literature
The literary historian William Maxwell writes that J.Edgar Hoover was " 'perhaps the most dedicated and influential forgotten critic of African-American literature. The longtime bureau director had a paranoid vision of literature that was simultaneously reverential and disdainful.' " "Hoover had no doubt that blacks were dumber than whites, and so were particularly susceptible to brain-washing by wily Communists promising them racial equality." "Of the 51 writers whose  bureau's files Maxwell obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, 27 were on the bureau's Custodial Detention index or one of its offspring." (Source: Peter C. Baker, "Critical Agents," The Nation, May 25, 2015.)

*Four Reasons Jeb Bush May Lose the Hispanic Vote
1;) He opposes President Obama's executive order on immigration. 2.) He supports the position of securing the border first. 3.) He doesn't support a path to citizenship. 4.) He opposes an increase in the minimum wage, which most Hispanics support.

*Cutting Down Texas's Abortion Clinics
In the case of  Whole Women's Health v. Lahey, the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit appeals court ruled that the state's interest in safeguarding patient safety outweighs the inconvenience to women who must travel long distances to gain access to the procedure. The state law imposes strict building codes for outpatient surgical centers and requires doctors to have local hospital-admitting privileges. It is estimated that the law will shutter all but eight abortion clinics, most clustered in the central and eastern parts of the state.

"Not since Roe v. Wade has a law or court decision had the potential to devastate access to reproductive health care on such a sweeping scale," said Nancy Northrup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights.  The appeals court was also naive in buying into the safety argument, because restricting access to abortion facilities helps bring back the bloody era of back alley and coat hanger abortions.

*NASA Priorities
"We should not supplant the real environmental imperative to preserve the earth with the fantasy of colonizing other planets." It's unlikely that it [Mars] will ever be worth the trip. NASA should turn over its attention to saving the earth rather than leaving it." (Source: Letter to the editor by John Huxhold, The New Yorker, July 20, 2015.)

*Peace Action on Israeli Nukes
Peace Action, the nation's largest grassroots peace and justice organization, has said that the Obama Administration made a choice at the NPT Review Conference: "It chose to put Israel's desire to preserve its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East ahead of the stated goal of strengthening and extending nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation measures." Instead, Peace Action urged the  U.S. to: 1.) Work to convene a conference to make the Middle East free of all nuclear weapons of mass destruction; 2.) Initiate negotiations for a nuclear weapons convention to eliminate all nukes worldwide, as required by the NPT's Article VI.; 3.) Cancel funding for the $1 trillion nuclear modernization program.

*Dehorned Cows
Most of the roughly nine million dairy cows in the United States have been dehorned -- to protect handlers and other cows. Scott Fahrenkrug, a professor of animal science, who specializes in precision gene editing, realized it wold be a solution to dehorning to rewrite the corresponding DNA in an embryo of a dairy breed. "Presto! Hornless cows that give a lot of milk." (Source: Kat McGovern, "Good Breeding," Mother Jones, September/October 2015.)

*Digital Media Campaign Ads
Online spots cost a fraction of traditional TV or print ads. Larry Gisdano, who oversaw paid advertising efforts for the 2008 and 2912 Obama campaigns, predicts that the 2016 presidential nominees will likely devote nearly a quarter of their ad-buy budgets to digital media. The Federal Elections Commission's last major overhaul of political advertising rules was in 2012. Currently, the commission does not have the ability to scrutinize how a campaign or any other group spends its money online. (Source: Russ Aroma, "Other Ads Attack," Mother Jones, September/October 2015.)

*Katrina Polling
"Sixty per cent of blacks felt that the response [to Katrina] was slow because of the race of the storm's primary victims, only twelve percent of whites concurred." "Sixty-three of blacks felt that the response was slow because the victims were poor, a sentiment shared by just twenty-one per cent of whites."

"Katrina was a tragedy compounded by ineptitude, for another, it was a casting of a drama that stretched back at least eight decades and suggested that, if the past is prologue, the disaster was not just predictable but possibly inevitable." "The  population of New Orleans went from being sixty-seven per cent black, in 2005, to fifty-nine per cent in 2013, which literally changed the color of the electoral politics in the city."  (Source: Jelani Cobb, "Race and the Storm," The New Yorker, August 24, 2015.)